‘You used to be black or white, gay or straight. Now it’s very complex’
Benjamin Zephaniah on his hit poetry show, and why he’s different from today’s talent. By
‘IBroadcasters tried to make ‘X Factor’-style poetry shows. But they never worked
don’t know who these Bafta gods are, but I didn’t think they’d watch something like that,” says Benjamin Zephaniah. The Rastafarian poet can still hardly believe that his Sky Arts show Life & Rhymes – poetry’s answer to Later... with Jools Holland – beat the light-entertainment juggernauts of Strictly, The Masked Singer and Ant and Dec at the TV awards in June.
When Zephaniah was asked to host the show last year he was hesitant. “We didn’t know much about Covid,” he says. “And the news in the media was that black men of a certain age are very susceptible to it – and I was that black man of that age! I’m thinking, ‘I’m not going to be hanging out with teenagers spitting their bars…’”
For safety, they opted to film outdoors, a decision they’ve stuck with for the second season, which begins tonight. Shot beneath the twinkling fairy lights of a bandstand in London’s Battersea Park, it has an atmosphere unlike anything else on television.
The spoken-word scene has been burgeoning for years – the videos of popular poets such as Hollie Mcnish and Rupi Kaur are watched by millions on Youtube – but Life & Rhymes is the first showcase for it on British TV. “There’ve been quite a few pilots by the BBC and other broadcasters,” says Zephaniah, “but they’ve never gone to air because they haven’t quite worked. They’ve tried poetry X Factor-style.” Life & Rhymes cracked the winning formula by aiming for “a festival feeling” instead.
Its success is a personal vindication for the 63-year-old, who – alongside the likes of John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson – helped make spoken word fashionable back in the 1980s, and went on to become one of Britain’s best-known poets (as well as a bestselling novelist, a professor of creative writing and, lately, an actor in the crime drama Peaky Blinders).
“The oral tradition is older than the written tradition,” he says. “Within almost any black community in the world it has utmost importance. And that’s for Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Nigerians... When I go to those places, if somebody says to me, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘I’m a poet,’ they don’t say, ‘Oh darling, what have you had published?’ They say, ‘Go on, do one, show me.’”
Life & Rhymes shares its title with Zephaniah’s 2018 autobiography. One of seven children, he grew up in Hockley, Birmingham, in a home with an outdoor bath and no phone, where he would play in the rubble of nearby bomb “pecks”.
He struggled with literacy – as an adult, he was diagnosed with dyslexia – but always had an ear for the rhythm of words, dazzling the congregation at his church by reciting the books of the Bible forwards and backwards to a reggae beat. It was the pastor there who first called him his adopted name, Zephaniah.
He was arrested several times as a child, once for defending his mother from his violent father by stabbing him in the street with a pen-knife. Expelled from his local comprehensive, he spent time in both borstal and prison before making a new start as a poet in London. By the mid-80s he was drawing huge crowds on the alternative cabaret circuit with poems about race, politics and police beatings (one poem was called Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death).
Today’s young acts, he says, write more about “the self ”. “How can I put this?” he starts. “When I was young you were black or white, gay or straight. Anything non-white was black, and anything non-gay was straight.” He laughs, shaking his head. “Now there are so many different shades, and sometimes, for somebody of my age, it feels very complex.”
Zephaniah, who is divorced, has spoken before about his deep regret that he has not had children – he discovered he was infertile after taking a test for a TV programme, and his criminal record prevented him and his ex-wife from adopting. But, he calls the performers on Life & Rhymes his “family”.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding a bit overemotional, but they almost feel like my children. These were the kids that were raised on my poetry,” he says. “Some of them will say, ‘I loved your poetry at school, I was raised on it, and now my children are reading it.’ And I’ll think ‘Gosh, you know, I’m a grandad!’”
Life & Rhymes is on Sky Arts today at 9pm